Exploring the Wreckage of Golden Kids

Author: Borealis Capps

Editor: Samantha Ferreira

Not all innovative ideas burst forth into the world with the timing necessary to achieve mainstream success. In the gaming world, for example, DataSoft’s Le Stick for the Atari 2600 was a commercial failure due to a lack of interest in its gimmick alongside the 1983 video game crash. Twenty-five years later, though, Nintendo’s Wii game console would release a similar controller that took the world by storm. The anime industry has a similar tale in Golden Kids, a soccer anime created by Youichi Takahashi of Captain Tsubasa fame that was struck down by its unique distribution system and an unpredictable roadblock that quite literally shook Japan to its core.

Captain Tsubasa held a grip on the cultural zeitgeist heading into the early 2000s. Its third television adaptation, Captain Tsubasa: Road to 2002, began airing in October 2001 and the greater series stood as one of the most popular in all of Japan. Captain Tsubasa was considered such a valuable asset that it was used as a tool to improve international relations between Japan and Iraq during the US occupation of the country after 9/11.1 It didn’t hurt that football itself was enjoying a global boom, with increased TV coverage of major events, or that players like Lionel Messi and Fernando Torres, who were inspired by the earlier anime adaptations of the manga were bursting onto the professional scene. 

At the same time, the anime industry was seeing a revolution in the way it was distributed, especially among less legal means. Gone were the days of VHS trading as technologies like LimeWire, Kazaa, and YouTube dominated the scene. In 2006, a group of University of California, Berkeley graduates launched a service called “Crunchyroll” that quickly took the anime viewing public in English-speaking markets by storm. Legal or not, it quickly became clear that online distribution was the future of the anime industry abroad.

If there was a hot iron that looked perfect to strike as the world entered the 2010s, it was the creative works of Youichi Takahashi. By adapting one of his light novels, Golden Kids, this perfect storm of sports popularity, cultural relevance, and unique market changes could potentially be combined to launch a pioneering effort of anime distribution that had never been seen before.

The stage was set; the Golden Kids Production Committee would create a show to release simultaneously worldwide featuring a Japanese and English dub, as well as subtitles in Portuguese and Spanish in 2011. It would be distributed initially through an app for iPhone and other iOS devices, with the first two episodes priced at $2.99 each.

“Distributing an anime around the world at the same time, and taking on new challenges is extremely important and financially worthwhile,” said series producer Shu Yamada on an episode of NHK World's imagine-nation.2 “Captain Tsubasa is still being aired abroad. You get the feeling they’ve been waiting for a new release by [Youichi] Takahashi.”

Other staff interviewed for the episode made it clear they were aware of the current issues the industry was facing with piracy. “If you distribute via computers, it’s easy to fall prey to online piracy and illegal copying,” staff said during the same episode. Despite this, they remained hopeful this new distribution model might still be able to bring in money through different means saying, “One might be able to reach places that TV can’t, and those people might spend money on more product-related things instead.”

Despite the initial hopes, four months after the anime’s January 2011 premiere, plans changed to allow the initial episode to be viewed for free in an attempt to draw viewers in. Subsequent episodes, meanwhile, were sold for just $0.99 apiece. No episodes were released after the initial two, and official social media accounts for the series went silent in August of the same year.

Many reasons could be speculated on as to why the anime failed or ceased production. Its unique distribution system could potentially have been considered a fault, but even at the time, Crunchyroll was beginning to move into legal distribution, showing that watching anime online had potential among global audiences if supported by ads instead of per-episode fees. Just ten years later, apps like ReelShort would see massive increases in downloads and popularity, showing the per-episode format for selling shows could potentially succeed. Meanwhile, many manga apps sell their stories by the chapter now, and even modern hentai releases sell by the episode on platforms like CoolMic. 

It’s more than likely, though, that the 2011 Tohoku earthquake and tsunami mentioned on Golden Kids’ official website were what took down the series. When Pierrot, a studio behind massive titles like Naruto or Bleach almost collapsed after the natural disaster, a fledgling product like Golden Kids likely didn’t stand a chance of getting the funding needed to survive. It probably didn’t help that the anime’s quality was relatively low, with its English dub being generously described as “atrocious.” Main character Goal Kitagawa yelling out cheesy one-liners like, “if we don’t lose, we’ll win!” that sound more at home in something like Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby than a respectable sports anime probably didn’t help either.

Golden Kids came at a time of extreme hardship within Japan and when the market, while primed to embrace internet distribution of shows, may not have yet been ready to embrace a pay-by-episode style of release. With platforms like dental hygiene apps licensing exclusive anime and shows being created for platforms like TikTok, there are still strange new worlds where anime can be distributed. Golden Kids can serve as an instructional lesson on what pitfalls to avoid for those who attempt to boldly go where no anime has gone before.

• 1. Lam, P.E. Japan’s Quest for “Soft Power”: Attraction and Limitation. East Asia 24, 349–363 (2007)

• 2. August 16, 2011 episode of imagine-nation, NHK-World, Television